The most fascinating thing about the poll, aside from the large percentage of Democrat sea sponges who believe the 12-year prediction, is how the number of voters who believe it has skyrocketed in just a few months. When Rasmussen first polled on this issue back in January, after Ocasio-Cortez first publicly made her prediction, only 23 percent of voters agreed with it. Back in January, however, only 34 percent of Democrats believed what Ocasio-Cortez says only a sea sponge would have taken seriously. This shows the incredible influence the socialist wing of the Democratic Party has on the party as a whole.

Having Tide Pod Evita as your thought leader is like having Jesse Ventura as your charm school superintendant.

Nobody has to be a progressive to be concerned about the environment. Nobody has to be a progressive to respond to climate change. Any proposal that conditions response to climate change on the adoption of the full progressive platform is not only doomed to fail, but it raises the question of whether the declared climate emergency is more pretext than crisis. There’s a need for a serious discussion about our climate. The Green New Deal is not serious.

When private health insurance was unable to provide uniform affordable coverage, Congress had no choice but to take it over through Obama-care. The success of that program proves the principle is sound: government must do what private industry can’t do.Thousands of people are without electricity during dangerously cold weather. Private power companies have demonstrated they are incapable of providing uniform affordable coverage. Congress has no choice but to take over the electrical industry. This is right in line with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ socialist philosophy, she’s the logical choice to introduce the legislation. Government, not private business, is the only way to ensure prompt and efficient delivery of essential services to women and minorities, whatever the weather might beIn other news, the Post Office isn’t delivering mail today. Mn/DOT pulled its snowplows off the road. St. Paul schools are closed and it’s mandatory recycling program is suspended. Government workers cannot promptly and efficiently deliver essential services because of the weather. Hmm, maybe we should revisit the concept of government taking over private businesses? Do we really expect union government employees to be climbing power poles in the howling freezing wind in the dead of night? Would that idea work any better than Obama-care or its inevitable successor, Kamela-care?Whatever those guys on the power poles make (and they’re almost all guys), it’s not enough. Whatever those gals in Congress make (and the goofy ones are almost all gals), it’s too much.

I for one am so happy I’ve got private-sector power. Although it’s a private monopoly in the area, so it’s not quite free market…

Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools are closed today. I’m getting old, my memory isn’t what it was. I remember looking forward to snow days, but did we get cold days off school? My sister claims there were a couple of occasions when the country kids didn’t have to come in, only the town kids, but I wonder if that was due to bad roads for the school busses more than low temperatures?I’m having trouble squaring school closures for cold, record setting cold in Chicago, freezing temperatures for 75% of the nation, with The New Hotness’ claim global warming will destroy the world in 12 years. Although if it does, I suppose women and minorities will be hardest hit, so I’ve got that going for me.

In mere minutes, Ocasio-Cortez managed to affirm nearly every negative stereotype about the female sex, from the trope that we’re no good at math to the notion that you shouldn’t trust us with a credit card. If all you saw was her example, you’d think we’re all just emotional dreamers who need to be reined in by reality

Ocasio-Cortez is not the feminist hero most media coverage has made her out to be. If anything, her time in the spotlight has set women in politics back.

Not just women. I have a hunch after a few years of her (and Reps. Omar and Tlaib), millennials outside the safest of coastal loonie bins are going to have a harder sell to get into office as well.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, self-described champion of the working person, fudged her workman’s comp for her own campaign employees.

That’s OK, there really are two different sets of rules out there, and nobody is going to make modern Progressivism’s “It Girl” accountable for anything of the sort.

But the rest of the world? That’s another story.

The restaurant at which the Congresswoman tended bar closed last August. And there, the story deepens – if you work for a living in the Bronx:

Interestingly, the progressive congresswoman bemoaned in August the closing of a restaurant where she was previously employed — however, the restaurant cited an Ocasio Cortez-endorsed policy as a partial reason for its closure. “The times have changed in our industry. The rents are very high and now the minimum wage is going up and we have a huge number of employees,” one of restaurant’s co-founders said at the time. “Ocasio-Cortez’s desired ‘living wage’ of $15 an hour has been a living hell for many small business owners in New York, who’ve been unable to offset the cost through higher prices,” Employment Policies Institute Managing Director Michael Saltsman said in response to the closure. “It’s fine to mourn the impending closure of your former employer — it’s better to understand the misguided minimum-wage mandates that contributed to that closure.”

Why is it that the party that claims to eschew war (while getting us into most of the wars we’ve had since 1900) can’t keep its mitts off of militaristic rhetoric?

Big Left’s “Green New Deal” is, like nearly every gigantistic utopian Big Left enterprise since the Wilson Administration, the “moral equivalent of war” – requiring the nation to organize its economy along military lines, albeit without saying the “M” word.

…the important point is that ever since philosopher William James coined the phrase the “moral equivalent of war,” American liberalism has been recycling the same basic idea: The country needs to be unified and organized as if we are at war, but not to fight a literal battle. The attraction stems from what John Dewey called “the social possibilities of war” — the ability to reorganize and unify society according to the schemes of planners and experts.This was the through line of 20th-century liberalism, and now 21st-century liberalism, too. Wilson’s war socialism, FDR’s New Deal, Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, Jimmy Carter’s declaration that the energy crisis was a “moral equivalent of war,” and Barack Obama’s “new foundation for growth,” with his Thomas Friedman-inspired talk about “Sputnik moments”: It’s all the same idea gussied up as something new.Another irony: The militaristic organization of the domestic economy is a hallmark of nationalist movements. But nationalism is a dirty word among liberals today.Instead, they name-check a thoroughly nationalistic enterprise, the New Deal, and slap the word “Green” in front of it as if it were a fresh coat of paint.

If it got out that migrants mocked and taunted intersectional theory, I’d guess Big Left would appropriate the idea of a border wall, too.

The New Hotness wants higher income tax rates. The Left says it’s sensible and there’s historical precedent.The trouble with historical precedent is picking the right precedent. College students who drink until they vomit could point to Rome, the pinnacle of civilization at the time, where vomitoria were provided in public entertainment venues. So that makes it alright? No.Similarly, picking a time when America was the world economic superpower and capital investment had nowhere else to go, doesn’t mean that high earners today would find their wages captured by higher tax rates. Rich people are rich, they’re not stupid. They can move to low-tax venues. They can shelter their incomes. They can lobby for loopholes that only they can afford. The only way to ensure that everybody pays their “fair share” is to fully embrace Communism: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. But getting ordinary people into that mental state will require a period of socialization, during which the recalcitrant, deplorable, bitter clingers are identified and sent for re-education in the far North, or sent to farm the land by hand, or buried in mass graves. And who will decide who lives and who dies?

But the fact that it used to be the status quo back when the US was the world’s only functional economy (with ample tax shelters provided for the fabulously wealthy, like Ocasio Cortez’s benefactors) makes it “moderate”, to Big Left.

The short answer: whille the GOP on the national level capitulates on spending and allow all sorts of government scope creep the chips are down, the Democrats take the gas pedal of power and jam it to the firewall:

Democrats are increasingly lining up to support a “Green New Deal,” which, while vague on details, could end up being the largest expansion of government in decades.As it stands, the “Green New Deal” is more aspirational than actual policy. Indeed, it takes its name from the New Deal of the 1930s, and its main backer, incoming Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, compared it to the Great Society of the 1960s.More than 40 Democratic lawmakers support the “Green New Deal” as part of a broad plan to fight global warming and bring about what they see as “economic, social and racial justice.” A poll found most Americans supported the deal, but knew little about it.But the big question is when Americans find out what’s in the “Green New Deal,” will they be willing to pay for it?

After a few months or years of media alarmism and emotional logrolling from an in-the-bag media?

She doesn’t “drive anyone crazy”. She’s a walking, talking testimony to the media’s left-wing bias; Ocasio Cortez actually is as vapid and ignorant as the media would have had you believe Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann were, and much more extreme.

Ocasio-Cortez, seen from that point of view, presents Republicans with a lot of things they despise — her far-left politics — wrapped up in a package that they very much want but cannot have. She’s everything they want and everything they hate at the same time: Odi et amo, RNC chairman Ronna Romney McDaniel might well say.

About those politics: Ocasio-Cortez describes herself as a socialist, a declaration mitigated somewhat by the fact that she doesn’t seem to know what the word “socialist” means. She is a reflexive practitioner of identity politics, immediately suggesting that any criticism of her is racist or sexist or both. And she is an unapologetic authoritarian, threatening to abuse congressional subpoena powers to retaliate against Donald Trump Jr. for posting something mean about her on Twitter. An avowedly socialist practitioner of identity politics and social-media bully: that, and not her views on marginal tax rates, is what gets up Republicans’ noses. Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist, too, but he’s a grumpy old Muppet from Vermont — a useful cat’s paw to maul Mrs. Clinton, but otherwise old news.

But Williamson notes there’s danger in making her too much the figurehead of Big Left’s “Resistance from Above”:

As a purely tactical matter, Republicans would probably be better off keeping Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer as their leading partisan archnemesis, inasmuch as neither of those candidates can deride the GOP as the party of rich old white folks without inspiring at least a little bit of a giggle.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may personify much of what Republicans despise about the distinctively millennial brand of censorious progressivism that currently dominates the Democratic Party, but, if they were smarter, they’d be grateful for that: If this callow dilettante is the best the other side has to offer, then maybe the Republicans — no strangers to callow dilettantism — still have a chance after all.

She – and her elder sister in entitled identitymongering, Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren – are in that sense gifts to conservatism. Is the GOP – conservatism’s current vessel – smart enough to know what to do with them?

I get it now. I understand. It’s hard to change a lifetime of thinking one way, the wrong way, but I get it now.

I hope my children do worse than I. I hope their prospects are dimmer, their fortunes poorer, their deaths early.

You see, I once believed that by staying in school to get an education, working hard in my job, spending frugally and investing wisely, that I was making a better life for myself and my family. But now that I’m woke, I see that I never earned anything, I didn’t build my career, it was all handed to me because my parents weren’t divorced and my Mother read to me.

I have White Privilege.

Oh, sure, I saw the brown, black, red and yellow kids outside the razor wire, watching us White kids go to the school where they were denied admittance. I saw them sitting against the wall of the supermarket, their bellies distended, flies buzzing around their heads, because they life in a food desert. I thought that was the natural and inevitable consequence of their parents’ cultural choices. I thought White culture was better at protecting women and children while building and conserving wealth.

But I understand things now and I’m not going to let my children make the same mistakes that I made. I’m pulling them out of STEM school and getting them hooked on drugs to ensure they never go back. I’m squandering my savings on a tricked-out Yukon with 20-inch Spreewells. I’m quitting my job and committing a few felonies, to ensure I can’t get another. When my kids’ lives are as bad as the kids in the lowest strata of society, then things will be fair.

I’m gonna take a wild guess that if you asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez how precisely it was that the US defeated Naziism, “turbocharging the industrial base and floating the whole thing on a sea of oil and a mountain of coal, to back up a complete national militarization” isn’t what she’s thinking.

Most European countries (including Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium) if they joined the US, would rank among the poorest one-third of US states on a per-capita GDP basis, and the UK, France, Japan and New Zealand would all rank among America’s very poorest states, below No. 47 West Virginia, and not too far above No. 50 Mississippi. Countries like Italy, S. Korea, Spain, Portugal and Greece would each rank below Mississippi as the poorest states in the country.

…when the main stream media went nearly bugeyed shrieking about Melania Trump, Sarah Palin, and for that matter Nancy Reagan and their respective wardrobes?

Of course you do.

And I am just amazed that nobody in the mainstream media seems to find this remotely worth comment. It’s a wardrobe day in the life of the Democrat party is flavor of the month, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

Democratic socialist House candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez banned reporters from attending several of her public town hall events this week.

Ocasio-Cortez, who shocked the political world by defeating Rep. Joe Crowley (D–N.Y.) in June’s Democratic primary, held sessions with constituents of New York’s 14th Congressional District on Sunday and Wednesday. But while she tweeted out some details about the town halls, she didn’t let members of the media attend in person, according to the Queens Chronicle.

The candidate’s campaign manager, Vigie Ramos Rio, tells the Chronicle the ban was implemented after reporters “mobbed” her last week following a community meeting. The campaign had apparently made it clear there would be “no Q&A and no one-on-one [interviews].”

“Whether you fundamentally care about reproductive rights and access right, because these are not the same thing, if you care about social justice or economic justice, agency – you have to care about this.

It is not a disconnected fact – to address this t-shirt of 1973 – that American women entering the labor force from 1973 to 2009 added three and a half trillion dollars to our economy. Right?”

Huh.

And if we had a few million more people with active minds, in a society that hadn’t come to accept infanticide and with a family structure that hadn’t broken down, imagine what would have happened then?

A dozen invalid ballots? I would like to know if the full dozen were all witnessed by the same ineligible person or if its a dozen ineligible persons. I would also like to know the reason for their ineligibility (i.e. out of state resident, suspended civil rights, or simply failure to register to vote). Given that CD1,CD2 & CD8 are all in play for possible Republican takeover and CD5 has media darling Omar who, like Ocasio-Cortez, must be supported at any cost to keep the millennial voters interested enough to vote, it is not unlikely that the ineligible witness is an out of state operative associated with the DNC or one of the Soros based groups. I would also like to know what subgroups those ineligible ballots came from (black, Asian, Hispanic, etc). If Omar loses out to Keliher then she’s out of office/politics for at least a couple years

Greater Minnesota seems to be getting redder, so the DFL needs its bulwark in the metro to be as strong as possible.

Ben Shapiro challenged prog flavor of the month Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez to a debate – something she’s never had in her “political career”.

Now, there’s no requirement that a pol debate anyone, ever – even their opponents for office, much less pundits. Of course, it can be used against you – not that it matters in a one-party town like Ocasio-Cortez’ district.

MoviePass is a particularly dimwitted startup – it sells, basically, transit cards to movies, in theaters, allowing people admittance to n movies per month, which in the age of Netflix and Hulu seems a bit like selling season tickets to Jesse Ventura’s old Indoor Football league.

As one might expect, the company – which seems a throwback to the sort of startups that glutted the market and popular culture during the DotBomb era, before 9/11 – is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

In explaining his decision to close following 28 years of high-volume business, owner Charles Milite told the New York Post, “The times have changed in our industry. The rents are very high and now the minimum wage is going up and we have a huge number of employees.”

Milite employs about 150 people at his breakfast, lunch, and dinner operation, which also puts him over the Affordable Care Act’s costly mandate that establishments with 50 or more employees provide health insurance.

The Coffee Shop is part of The Gotham City Restaurant Group, which also owns Flats Fix, the former employer of socialist darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The 28-year-old Democratic congressional candidate recently told The New York Times that many of her fellow restaurant workers were uninsured, inspiring her to run for office.

And the inevitable end result?

Eventually, minimum wage laws and other prohibitive regulations will cause the world-renowned restaurant life in cities like New York, DC, and San Francisco to cease to exist. The staff skill levels will drop, the number of servers and bartenders will never be enough, and the only survivors will be fast-casual chains with low overhead and deep pockets.

New York’s new look will be vacant storefronts between an occasional Pret-a-Manger or the public restroom formerly known as Starbucks. But don’t worry. That charming, downtown studio apartment will still run about $5,000 per month for the privilege of proximity to all that culture.

Minneapolis and Saint Paul’s efforts to be little New Yorks will no doubt pay off – in all the wrong ways.

It probably doesn’t qualify as a “Berg’s Law” because it may not be absolute and universal – but for the most part, if you scratch the surface of an American “Democratic Socialist”, you’ll find a rich kid with daddy issues.

So, it seems, with current socialist wunderkind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Last week’s big primary winner in a Congressional district that includes parts of the Bronx and Queens highlighted the 29 year old “community organizer”, who will likely be going to Congress, and her “Jenny from the Block” story. Listening to her before the election, I caught myself humming “It’s A Hard Knock Life” more than a few times.

So was it baked wind?

What do you think? Remember – it’s almost a Berg’s Law:

Around the age of five, Alexandria’s architect father Sergio Ocasio moved the family from the “planned community” of Parkchester in the Bronx to a home in Yorktown Heights, a wealthy suburb in Westchester County. The New York Times describes her childhood home as “a modest two-bedroom house on a quiet street.” In a 1999 profile of the area, when Ocasio-Cortez would have been ten years old, the Times lauded Yorktown Heights’ “diversity of housing in a scenic setting” – complete with two golf courses.

Westchester County – which the Washington Post, in a glowing profile on Ocasio-Cortez, describes as only “middle class” – ranks #8 in the nation for the counties with the “highest average incomes among the wealthiest one percent of residents.” According to the Economic Policy Institute, the county’s average annual income of the top one percent is a staggering $4,326,049.

Yorktown Heights, specifically, offers a sharp contrast from Bronx living. According to USA.com, the town’s population is 81 percent white, and median household income is $96,413 – nearly double the average for both New York state and the nation, according to data from 2010-2014.

I interviewed for a job in Westchester County thirty years ago; the program director basically told me there was no way I could live in the area on what they could payme (here was the story).

Not that there’s anything wrong with doing well; but not only didn’t Ocasio-Cortez earn it, she wants to make it harder for others to do it.

(Even as she, beyond a doubt, gets ready to make a couple million in honoraria from liberals with deep pockets over the next few years, much like the Bern she no doubt felt).